The Last Lifeboat, page 4
At this, Arthur jumped down from the table and hopped around the kitchen like a kangaroo until he made his sister laugh. Lily loved his exuberance, but she was tired, and his antics that evening tugged at the frayed edges of her patience.
She cleared the dinner plates with a determined clatter. ‘You can see kangaroos at the zoo. Anyway, even if we did have relatives in Australia – which we don’t – we think you’ll be better off staying at home.’ She still spoke about ‘we’ and ‘our’, unable to make the adjustment to ‘I’ and ‘my’. ‘We’ll make the best of things here, together, like we always have. And that’s the end of it.’ She put her teacup down a little too firmly on the draining board, knocking another onto the floor.
Her terse response and the noise of the breaking cup made Georgie cry, which made Arthur cry, and that made Lily cry because although she put on a brave face in front of the children, sometimes everything felt like a broken teacup and it was all too much. She sent the children out to play and took a quiet moment in the pantry. She didn’t like them to see her cry.
As she dabbed her eyes and steadied her breathing, her gaze strayed to Peter’s old pullover hanging on the back of the pantry door. She pressed a sleeve to her cheek. It still carried the familiar scent of his trade as a signwriter: mint and lanolin from his artist soap, turpentine, linseed. She’d never got round to darning the hole in the elbow, the worn strands of wool forever frayed now, the neat stitches eternally unravelling.
Unravelling.
Of course.
She fetched the incomplete crossword from earlier. Thirteen across. Coming apart (11 letters). Unravelling. She completed the puzzle, but it didn’t give her the usual sense of satisfaction. Like Peter’s old pullover, she, too, was coming apart.
Later, when the children were in bed, she took the crumpled piece of paper from the pocket of her apron. She smoothed it out and looked at the information she’d scribbled down. CORB, 45 Berkeley Street, W1. She thought about the way the man on the radio had stumbled over his words; the uncertainty in his voice. ‘The risks of the voyage are clear. The decision to evacuate is one for which any parents listening must take sole responsibility.’
She folded the page carefully, slipped it back into her pocket and picked up a framed photograph of Peter from the mantelpiece. He looked so carefree and happy, the light in his eyes caught in a way that made him look so alive.
‘What should I do, Peter? Please, love. I’m frightened. Tell me what to do.’
5 October 1939
The Phoney War limps on. Unbearable without the children (even the poor dog is off his food), but better safe than sorry, and they seem happy enough when they write (their little kisses at the end of their letters break my heart). Latest news is that the draft will extend to all men aged 18–41 in the new year. Anyone in a reserved occupation will get a pass. Everyone else will get their papers. Waiting is awful; wondering, worrying, imagining the worst. Sometimes feel I’m going mad. War does funny things to the mind.
Mass-Observation, Diarist #6672
5
Kent. May 1940
Alice sat in the window seat in her bedroom, her hair still wet from a disappointing bath in the few inches of water now permitted. She tried to settle to her book, but her mind wouldn’t rest, turning over the devastating images of the previous day. The mangled body of the pilot. The tangled wreck of the plane. Her body itched – physically itched – to be somewhere else, to do something other than sit in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by silly little ornaments and fussy home comforts while the world spun wildly and cruelly on. Eventually, she gave up on the book and made her way downstairs to the sitting room. She switched on the wireless and paced up and down the Persian rug as Anthony Quinn MP set out the details of his overseas evacuation scheme.
‘Parents will not be permitted to travel with children being evacuated under the CORB scheme, so applications are now sought from teachers, clergymen, healthcare workers, and those in other suitable professions who are willing to act as volunteers to escort the children during their long voyage. Enquiries should be submitted in writing to the Children’s Overseas Reception Board at 45 Berkeley Street, London. Successful applicants will be invited for interview and a full medical examination.’
Alice stopped pacing. Like a sea fog lifting, everything was suddenly clear. This, she could do. Children, she understood. And while she’d always found the open ocean daunting, she felt an affinity with the sea, a pull of possibility in its never-ending expanse. Yes, crossing the Atlantic came with its own risks, but so did staying in Britain. ‘You have to back yourself, Alice … Real life is lived in all the messy difficult bits.’
‘Still crowing about evacuation.’ Alice’s mother stalked into the sitting room and switched off the wireless. ‘Cowards, the lot of them, if you ask me.’
Alice wanted to say that nobody had asked her, but, as she so often did with her mother, she bit her tongue. There was no use in trying to change her opinion, or in trying to alter who she was. Alice had long ago accepted her mother’s many faults.
‘Any mother considering evacuation should be ashamed. If the royal princesses are staying in England, I don’t see why anyone else should send their children away. We might as well wave the white flags and put up the swastikas now.’
Alice didn’t have the energy for a fight. ‘You’re right, Mother. They’re all horrid little cowards running away. I can’t understand why any mother would possibly want to keep their children safe by sending them overseas.’
A disgruntled harrumph followed Alice as she made her way upstairs, and paused outside her father’s study. She pressed her hand against the dark oak door before turning the handle and peering inside. It was a room full of memories, a room full of ghosts. She’d spent so many happy hours here as he’d patiently taught her to play chess. Sometimes she’d pretended not to understand, or had stalled when she’d already worked out her next move, so that the lesson would last longer. ‘We don’t always see the solution straightaway, Alice. It takes practice and patience. But the best move will reveal itself eventually.’ And so it was with the question of what she could do to play her part in the war.
Kitty was right. Their mother had taken advantage of her for far too long. As a young girl, forced to grow up quickly beneath the shadow of grief, it had been Alice who had taken the maternal role in the family, their mother unable to cope without a husband whose sudden loss exposed her many failings. But Alice accepted that her mother was right, too. There was a role for her, a way to do something useful to help the war effort, and she would have to leave Willow Cottage, and England, in order to do it.
Alice closed the study door, went upstairs and wrote her letter of application. The next chapter in her ‘narrow little life’ would now be determined by the few words sealed inside an envelope that she would drop into the postbox on the village green. She felt a quiet sense of destiny as she slipped the envelope into her skirt pocket. A moment of calm. A change in the weather.
She spent the rest of the day at the harbour with Walter, partly to avoid her mother, but mostly because she enjoyed Walter’s company and steady assurance, and she needed both.
As the sun began to sink toward the horizon, they cycled back to Walter’s cottage, but as they turned the final corner, Alice pulled her bicycle to a stop. COWORD was daubed in bright red paint across the front wall.
Walter leaned his bicycle against the gate. ‘Idiots can’t even insult me properly. You’d think they would at least learn to spell the word “coward” if they intend to go around accusing people of being one!’
For all Walter’s nonchalant good humour, Alice knew the cruel taunts and disdainful looks hurt him. They hurt her, too. They made her furious. Walter didn’t deserve them.
‘I know it bothers you,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to brush it off for my benefit.’
Walter rolled up his shirtsleeves. ‘Brush it off is exactly what we’re going to do. You can grab a paintbrush and give me a hand.’
They worked quickly, covering the paint with a thick layer of limewash, but the intention behind the insult wouldn’t be so easily removed.
‘I hate this,’ Alice said as she slapped limewash roughly onto the wall. ‘I hate that they do this to you.’
‘Do what? Sticks and stones. They’re not doing anything to me. They might think they are, but that’s up to me.’ Walter tapped his head. ‘I decide whether I let it in.’
‘Can I ask you something?’ Alice said. ‘And please don’t hate me for it.’
‘Let me guess. You want to know if I wish I’d signed up instead of putting up with this. Am I right?’
Alice nodded, ashamed to have even considered asking.
He pushed his hair from his eyes and leaned back on his heels. ‘Honestly? I haven’t regretted my decision once.’ He stood up to check their work and declared the job done. ‘They call me a coward because they think I’m afraid of dying to protect our country. But it isn’t my death I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of bringing death and grief to someone else’s life. We know how that feels. If that makes me a coward, so be it.’
Alice thought about how he’d run toward the injured pilot without a thought for his own safety, how respectfully he’d closed the young man’s eyes, how calmly he’d told the local Red Cross volunteers about the casualty and taken them to the crash site. Walter wasn’t a coward. Far from it. He was the best of them all.
‘I can’t stop thinking about him, Walter.’ She imagined her Liberty silk scarf draped across the pilot’s face, a piece of her buried with him. The thought of it haunted her. ‘I can hear him, asking for his mummy. I hate that we couldn’t save him.’
‘I can’t stop thinking about him either, but at least he didn’t die alone. I like to think there was some comfort for him in that.’
They both stood in silence for a moment. Thinking. Remembering.
‘Do you remember when the dog had puppies and the runt died?’ Walter asked.
Alice nodded. She remembered it all too clearly. ‘Father said the depth of our sadness when someone dies is a measure of our love for them. Those few words gave my sadness a purpose, a reason.’
For a moment, Alice was a ten-year-old girl again, playing chess with her father on a quiet Sunday afternoon. White knight takes black knight, a proud smile, and then a look of shock – or was it fear? – on his face, his hand frozen in mid-air, the sickening thud as he fell to the floor.
‘Father didn’t waste his words,’ Walter said. ‘Whatever he said, he said for a reason. I also remember him saying that we can’t save everyone. That no matter how desperately we want to, or how deeply we care for them, we can’t save them all.’
‘But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, does it?’
‘Of course not. That’s why I ran to the pilot, even though I was terrified of what I would find. No matter how afraid we are, or how impossible it might seem, if there’s a chance to save someone or help them, even in some small way, we should always try.’
Alice smiled. ‘That sounds like something Father would have said, too.’
Walter put his arm around Alice’s shoulder. ‘You’d better remember it then. And you can think of me when you do.’
6
London. June 1940
The weeks wore on. Each day the children went to their makeshift school in the local church hall, Lily went to work, and in the hallowed halls of Westminster, the government talked about the matter of evacuation. Some days, the war was quiet. Distant, despite the proximity of Hitler’s army. But the lull never lasted long, and Ministry leaflets kept coming with their alarming information and warnings. The bold black lettering on a particularly sinister leaflet that arrived on a muggy June morning stopped Lily in her tracks.
She perched on the armchair in the sitting room and read the instructions with her heart in her mouth:
IF THE INVADER COMES – WHAT TO DO, AND HOW TO DO IT
Stay put if the enemy invades by parachute; do not attempt to run away as the invader may fire on civilians using machine guns from the air, as happened to Belgian and Dutch civilians.
It was more like fiction than fact, and it was the starkest indication yet that the government believed the Germans really would invade that summer.
Lily smoothed the paper on her knee. How could she possibly keep the children in London with the threat of machine guns being fired at them? The first time the children went away, it had felt inevitable. They would go to the countryside, and that was that. This time, it came down to individual choice.
But how to choose when both options were so frightening? Keep them close, but in almost-certain danger from Nazi oppression and bombs – a danger that would last until war was over – or send them away on a potentially perilous ocean crossing, but with a chance of reaching safety. It was the greatest puzzle Lily had ever tried to solve. She could hardly bear that she had to do it without Peter’s gentle assurance.
Think, Lily, think.
It was impossible to know what the months ahead would bring. So she turned to the one constant unfailing thing that she trusted – numbers. She turned probabilities over in her mind – invasion, bombs, the risk of a U-boat strike, the agony of separation. Which was the greater risk? What was the solution? She could hear Peter say: What are the odds, Lil?
A quietness fell over her, a clarity of thought. That was the answer, wasn’t it? To play the odds. And to do that, she had to apply to the CORB scheme in the first place.
A decision was made.
But the problem was far from solved.
The sultry June heat drew a flush to Lily’s cheeks as she stood outside the CORB offices on Berkeley Street a few days later. The limestone walls of the imposing Georgian building dazzled in the sun and gave her a headache. She felt out of place, out of sorts, the fourteenth person in a queue of hundreds patiently waiting to fill out the paperwork to send their children away as if they were a birthday gift for a distant relative.
She felt sick to her stomach as she leaned out of line again to count the people ahead of her. She was definitely fourteenth. She returned her gaze to the pattern in the tired-looking tea dress of the woman in front of her. Where other people saw flowers and leaves, Lily saw repetitions, symmetry, sequences. Never-ending repeating patterns. It made her mind spin if she thought about it too much.
The woman in front lit a cigarette and fanned her face with a Wedgewood-blue linen cloche that had clearly seen better days. Lily wondered if their places in the queue that June morning would have any bearing in the weeks to come. Thirteenth. Fourteenth. She imagined Peter beside her, smiling at her funny superstitions and the way she saw everything in patterns and numbers. He’d often teased her about it. Not in an unkind way, but in that affectionate familiar way that comes with twelve years of marriage and many more years of friendship before that. He’d joked that they would have to spend their thirteenth wedding anniversary apart in case something bad happened. In the end, they’d been parted by something far worse than an unlucky number.
Across the road, people went about their business at the barbers and poulterers, at Barratt’s shoe shop and the wine merchants. Great piles of sandbags stood against the windows of the Palace picture house and other shop fronts. Billboards shouted about the need to save paper. A passing omnibus advertisement declared that Guinness was good for you. Across the street, a large sign indicated the nearest air-raid shelter. Life went on, and yet life was unrecognizable. Behind Lily, the line of anxious parents wound on and on, until it disappeared around the corner. She took some reassurance in seeing so many others make the same impossible decision as she had.
The summer morning still carried the muggy heat that had kept Lily awake all night. The fabric of her dress stuck to the back of her neck and made her skin itch. She fidgeted and sighed and fanned her face with a Woman’s Weekly she’d bought to pass the time, but she was far too agitated to read instructions for knitting a balaclava helmet or making ‘a sturdy apron’ out of old tea towels. Her mouth was dry. Her stomach churned in nauseating knots of doubt and guilt. More than once, she convinced herself to forget the whole idea, catch the bus home, collect the children from Mrs Hopkins and sit in the shade of the laburnum tree in the backyard while they played hopscotch in the street. But she remained in her spot. Fourteenth. Part of a pattern she couldn’t break.
After what felt like an age, she tapped the woman in front on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me. Do you have the time?’
The woman jumped, startled by the interruption. She checked her wristwatch. ‘Just before ten, love. Good job we came early.’ She nodded at the long line behind Lily. ‘They’ll close the doors before half of them have even made it round the corner.’
‘I wish they’d hurry up,’ Lily said. ‘The longer I stand here, the more tempted I am to forget the whole thing and go home.’
‘Go home! Why on earth would you do that? This is our chance to send our kiddies to safety. A chance for the likes of us to do what them with money have been doing for months.’
The likes of us. The working class.
‘Still,’ the woman added, ‘it won’t be easy to say goodbye. I’ve five to send off. Four girls and a boy.’
‘Five! You must have your hands full.’
‘I do indeed.’ She lowered her voice. ‘We took the boy in from the children’s home, but you love them all the same, don’t you? No matter how they arrive. Poor little bugger. Unwanted goods, like scrap left out for the rag and bone.’
Their conversation was interrupted as a church bell began to strike ten. A ripple of anticipation passed down the line, a gathering of thoughts, a stiffening of shoulders and resolve. Moments later, a pretty young woman in a smart uniform of navy skirt and cream blouse opened the doors to what was previously Thomas Cook Travel Agents. Lily watched as the woman pulled up a window shutter, wound down a striped awning, and placed a potted pink geranium on either side of the door. It all felt wrong: the flowers, the neat uniform, the drawn-out business of opening up. The cheerful red-haired, red-lipped young woman ushering everyone inside seemed more suited to boarding holidaying passengers onto an ocean liner than to the serious business of the Children’s Overseas Reception Board.
